eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

January 2014

01/25/2014

I have seen a number of films that focus on the question of teacher’s unions and the quality of education in America. This film takes a look at the experiences of people in inner city schools who believe that their children have been trapped in a cycle of educational dysfunction by uncaring bureaucrats who place the careers of teachers above the success of students. The film tries hard not to draw hard lines between the various interest groups. There are teachers on both sides of the line. There are administrators on both sides of the line. There are parents on both sides of the line. Good and evil runs right down the middle of all of them (I suppose the movie’s great blind-spot involves the children themselves for if there is anything I can say from my own experience, it is that there are children of all ages who align themselves both for and against effective education. They are often injured by apathy in the ranks of teachers, parents, and administrators but they are by no means morally neutral.)

There are many who argue that the problem with education lies in teachers’ unions protecting incompetent teachers (and I have no doubt that this happens sometimes) but I would suggest that the bulletproof shield that has been placed around students themselves has had much more to do with the demise of educational systems than the protections put in place by unions. There are, no doubt, good reasons why the right to corporally punish students was taken away from teachers. There are probably also good reasons why the right to shame students was taken away as well. But from the safety of that cover, there are students that wage war against the system trying to educate them - a war that works to the detriment of their classmates.

I am not sure why we have come to believe that children have no moral obligations while teachers and administrators do but … it seems to be the way it is. What I know is that in the present system, without a union protecting me, I can lose my job to any administrator who wants to look hard enough to discover what I am not doing that I am told I must do (an eighty hour work week at the least if you are going to do it right.) The student who refuses to do his or her work though - they have protections without a union. People who would be fired from any job in the private sector find themselves the recipients of more money, resources, psychologists, personnel here. If they did what they do in school in a private sector job, they would lose those jobs. Their employers would not say “Oh, there is an employee who does almost nothing to profit my company. Let’s spend more money on him.”

In Won’t Back Down I think the parents do the right thing. It is a move towards balance. One can only hope that the pendulum does not swing so far to the other side that teachers become pedagogical fast-food workers, used, exploited, and discarded. It is easy to see how it could happen. Indeed, has happened.

Question for Comment: What is so hard about a union figuring out a way to protect itself from its own incompetence? Why is it so hard to create human systems that parasites cannot hide in?

The Gatekeepers reminds me a lot of the documentary, The Fog of War, an extended interview with Robert MacNamara about the moral lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War. In The Gatekeepers the director interviews six former directors of Shin Bet, the Israeli Intelligence Service responsible for counter-terrorism. Over the course of the film, key moments in the history of the organization are highlighted and discussed. The various personalities who have led the organization seek to explain their actions and to understand them in a moral and political context.

When asked about the morality of some of its least admirable assassinations, one of the men interviewed asserts his position on the ethics of counter-terrorism succinctly by saying,

“With terrorists there are no morals. Find morals in terrorists first. … In the war agaist terrorism, forget about morality. When there is a one ton bomb forget about morality.”

Another speaks of a moment when a Palestinian counterpart tells him in no uncertain terms, that “victory is seeing you suffer.” When two sides of a war start seeing their national aims in terms of increased suffering, it is hard to see a pleasant end. Each inflicted harm makes the other’s war aims even more unachievable. The logic of revenge only works in the opening rounds. And thus virtually all of the Shin Bet directors interviewed have come to a conclusion that dialogue and the building of trust is the only way out. “We should talk to everyone,” the oldest of them says [and includes Hamas, Hezbollah, and the leaders of Iran in that], “I see that he doesn’t eat glass. He sees that I don’t drink petrol”

I was reminded of what Martin Luther King said of our Vietnam War,

"Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition."

The director concludes the interviews by asking one of the respondents about a prophecy that Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz made right after the Six-Day War gave Israel the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights 1967. One year after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began he said:

“A state ruling over a hostile population of one million people will necessarily become a Shin Bet state, with all that this implies for education, freedom of speech and thought and democracy. The corruption found in any colonial regime will affix itself to the State of Israel. The administration will have to suppress an uprising on the one hand and acquire Quislings, or Arab traitors, on the other.”

Being solicited for a response to that prediction, the interviewee responds that this is essentially exactly what has come to pass. “We win every battle,” in that fight he says, “but lose the war.”

Question for Comment: How is life a battle for you? How comfortable are you with the morality of your approach to it?

01/19/2014

A Country of Vast Designs: James Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent REVIEW

“Ours is a go ahead people” - Thomas Benton

Historians have had difficulties gauging the quality of James Polk’s Presidency. Fewer Presidents of the United States have accomplished as much as he has and yet been so controversially regarded. In his favor, we can argue that Polk went into his Presidency as an underdog, laid out a game plan, and achieved it. He asserted a plan and executed it, accomplishing almost nothing that he did not plan to accomplish and failing to accomplish almost nothing that he set out to accomplish. He is not a candidate of broken promises. Add this to the fact that he was never a candidate with overwhelming powers of charisma and personal influence. Perhaps his strength is to be found in his ability to assign himself tasks within his capacity to achieve and to refrain from trying to do more than that.

Robert Merry details the life of James Polk with fair-mindedness and candor. By the time he is done, it becomes clear that James Polk, whatever his deficiencies and vices, was able to read the times and to act boldly in accordance with them. The two heavyweight champions that were running for office in 1846 shot themselves in the foot by opposing the annexation of Texas. They both asserted, and probably rightly so, that the annexation of Texas would eventually tear the union apart. But in the short-run, Polk understood that the American people were in an expansionist mood. His formula was a simple one: Promise the North Oregon and the South Texas. If you can, get more than Texas from Mexico if Mexico objects and if you can, get more of Oregon from the British if the British object. The secret to his electoral victory was to be everyone’s expansionist.

In hindsight, he opened up a Pandora’s box that Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren were prophetic enough to avoid opening. Polk’s administration would give us territory and war when other leaders would have taken neither if they could not have the former without the later. Polk is the “Gotta be willing-to-lose-big-to-win-big” President. And the American electorate was, on the whole, looking for that sort of leadership.

James Polk rose to prominence by being a loyal Jacksonian in a country enamored of Andrew Jackson. When Van Buren blinked on the Texas question, the revered grand-master of the democratic party threw him overboard and anointed Polk as the logical replacement. In Polk’s inaugural address, he moved directly to the central tannest of the Jacksonian creed; He asked for no Presidential powers not expressly implied in the constitution; He extolled the executive veto; He vowed to protect the union militarily if need be. He denounced National banks, high tariffs, national debts, and protecting industries. Revenue should be the object and protection the incident, he said. Above all, he served notice that the U.S. had the right to Oregon and to Texas annexation. If either those assertion caused a war, it we would be fighting on the side of justice.

In the case of Mexico, she had no right to object to a sovereign state (Texas) deciding to join our union. So long as we were not forcing Texas to do so, no nation on earth had a right to stand in Texas’ way. With respect to Oregon, we had explored the territory. It was contiguous with our own. And, of utmost importance, we were the principle demographic origin of its settlements. American people had settled in Oregon and the flag had every right to follow them.

Wisely, Polk insisted that he would only run for office for a four year term. He did not wish to be competing against Presidential hopefuls while he pursued his agenda and having a single term to carry out his plan kept him focused on it. Ironically, he died within four months of leaving office.

Robert Merry tells us that Polk was a descendent of the borderlands of Northern England and Scottish highlands. These were a group prone to border warfare and belief in honor. Polk was an early protégé’ of Andrew Jackson (who also descended from English borderland stock) and owed much of his political future to Jackson’s support. As Jackson was himself an expansionist, he favored followers that were as well. Polk was one of his ablest Lieutenants.

Throughout his career, Polk had opposed the Whig party’s assertion that the country was best served by placing political power in the hands of business owners and elites. Jackson wanted political power to remain diffuse and close to the people. The Whigs were in favor of keeping the power close to merit. Ironically, Polk would later learn that the people he believed to be so virtuous, could be just as greedy and grasping as any Whig banker. His journal reveals how disgusting he came to regard the multitudes of Jacksonian office seekers coming to him for fat government jobs.

So what was Polk’s plan?

In a nutshell, he planned to see to it that Texas came into the union and that Oregon Territory did as well. If this started a war with Mexico, it would only make it easier to acquire California and New Mexico and Arizona, lands which Polk believed were too much for Mexico to defend and thus, too tempting to England. If they could not be Mexico’s and he did not believe they could be indefinitely, they might as well be ours. Polk’s plan would avoid war or manufacture a war, whichever tactic brought California and the Southwest into the Union’s sway. This, he clearly believed, had to be done without looking like America was a bully. To accomplish this, a little bullying would be required behind the scenes.

Few other Presidents had been willing to be quite as bold as Polk. He came to office with plans and many of his strategies were not to be found in public records. There is no historical confirmation that Polk schemed for conditions that would allow him to declare war. Some historians see Presidential complicity but cannot prove it. There was a lot of American adventurism and adventurers and the dream of expanding America’s empire was something that many shared.

I guess what I find most interesting about the outcomes of Polk’s diplomatic effort to expand the country is how he allocated resources to the two prongs of the expansion. At the beginning of his term, his demands for territory in the Northwest and South west were relatively equivalent. But when it came to spending money on war, he chose to invest in a war with Mexico by compromising and making peace on Oregon. In other words, when all was said and done, the South got way more than the North. It is no surprise that regional distrust had many of its roots in the Polk era.

One of his Northern detractors accused him of villainous duplicity as a consequence.

“So long as one human eye remains to linger on the page of history the story of his abasement will be read,” said the detractor, “sending him and his name together to an infamy so profound a damnation so deep that the hand of resurrection will never be able to drag him forth.”

A good deal of the book is dedicated to the details of Polk’s negotiations with Britain and Mexico. It is evident that Polk was dealing from a position of strength when negotiating with Mexico because he was willing to send the army to the border and beyond. A policy of surrounding the Mexican capital made the country amenable to selling vast tracks of land that no equivalent expenditure of national resources could have arm wrestled out of Canada. The intrigues that brought California and the South west into the Union are interesting but somewhat nebulous. What seems obvious to me is that America was altogether ready to acquire these lands with military force as soon as force could convince itself that Mexico had started a war. When the Mexican governor of California ordered Americans out, it was only logical that they would “pull an Alamo.” Having seen just how Texas had managed to get itself into the union, California took similar measures (only this time, with some official United States help). Polk would insist that we never had the intention of stealing California. But like his predecessor, Andrew Jackson, who strong-armed a treaty out of the Cherokee, Polk understood how military pressure could be used to grease the skids of diplomacy.

Generals Zachery Taylor and Winfield Scott and thousands of U.S. troops, aided by the U.S. navy blockading Mexican ports and taxing their imports to pay for our war made the sale of Mexican territory a foregone conclusion.

I have many more pages of notes I could add here. Details of the Slidell mission, the conquest of Mexico, the acquisition of California, the debates in the U.S. Congress, the casualty lists, the long term ramifications, the debate over Polk’s legacy. Somehow, it all wearies me somewhat. Maybe if I lived in San Diego it would interest me more.

I am off to watch football (three of the four teams contending for the Superbowl this year come from the Mexican Cession or the Oregon Cession).

Question for Comment: James Polk sent American troops to the north side of the Rio Grande river and had them set up flags and play the star spangled banner and essentially provoke a Mexican attack. Taylor then closed off the Rio Grande to further provoke a wider conflict. In the resulting war, we grabbed territory from California that we “offered” to pay for. What does this tell us about who starts wars? Are they the people who shoot first?